Program Semantics in Model-Based WCET Analysis: A State of the Art Perspective

Abstract

Advanced design techniques of safety-critical applications use specialized development model based methods. Under this setting, the application exists at several levels of description, as the result of a sequence of transformations. On the positive side, the application is developed in a systematic way, while on the negative side, its high-level semantics may be obfuscated when represented at the lower levels. The application should provide certain functional and non-functional guarantees. When the application is a hard real-time program, such guarantees could be deadlines, thus making the computation of worst-case execution time (WCET) bounds mandatory.
This paper overviews, in the context of WCET analysis, what are the existing techniques to extract, express and exploit the program semantics along the model-based development workflow.